Immediate Family

About Robert Wise

Robert Earl Wise (September 10, 1914 – September 14, 2005) was an American film director, producer and editor. He won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965). He was also nominated for Best Film Editing for Citizen Kane (1941) and Best Picture for The Sand Pebbles (1966).

Among his other films are The Body Snatcher (1945), Born to Kill (1947), The Set-Up (1949), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Destination Gobi (1953), This Could Be The Night (1957), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), I Want to Live! (1958), The Haunting (1963), The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Hindenburg (1975) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

Wise was the president of the Directors Guild of America from 1971 to 1975 and the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1984 through 1987.

Often contrasted with auteur directors such as Stanley Kubrick, who tended to bring a distinctive directorial "look" to a particular genre, Wise is famously viewed to have allowed his (sometimes studio assigned) story to dictate style. Later critics, such as Martin Scorsese, expanded that characterization, insisting that despite Wise's notorious workaday concentration on stylistic perfection within the confines of genre and budget, his choice of subject matter and approach still functioned to identify Wise as an artist and not merely an artisan. Through whatever means, Wise's approach brought him critical success as a director in many different traditional film genres: horror, noir, western, war, science fiction, musical and drama, with many repeat successes within each genre. Wise's tendency towards professionalism led to a degree of preparedness which, though nominally motivated by studio budget constraints, nevertheless advanced the moviemaking art, with many Academy Award-winning films as the result. Robert Wise received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1998.